Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Meeting the Neighbors

Last Saturday I mentioned my first adventure in null-sec started out with a bang. Well, actually it started out with three bangs to be exact. One of the things we can now do in Stain that we could not do in Anoikis is mine moons. So the alliance has a few moon goo operations going.

We knew these operations would not go uncontested. Saturday morning was when the first reinforce timer expired on one of our contested moons. There was a small CTA called that I responded too as I had the proper ship type.

As we're the new kids on the block, we needed to see how the other kids played. So we put together a small bomber fleet to see what happened when the timer expired. I was sitting cloaked 300 kilometers off the small tower we had when the timer went to zero. Not long after that local began to spike.

What landed on grid was a Dominix fleet with Navy Vexor support, an Armageddon (neut?) and Oneiros logistics along with some other ancillary ships. All told there were 20 or 30 ships in the opposing fleet - I didn't bother to count. It was more than we had and that's all I needed to know. We didn't have any delusions that our 7 bomber fleet was going to really do anything, but we were certainly willing to give it a try.

The other fleet seemed ready for bombers. They had taken up scattered positions around the force field maintaining a very healthy distance between ships. We would not get more than two or three ships in our detonation radius in any given run so our FC decided to detonate on individual ships. Our FC picked his target and we all got our bombing angles.

On command, we went to full throttle, de-cloaked, launched and warped off. It was a classic multi-directional assault and all bombs seemed to land on target within a second of each other. At least the three I saw go off before I warped did. Yeah, it's a bit dangerous to pick a side angle warp out point rather than one straight ahead, but I like the second or two of extra time to enjoy the handy work. I know it'll get me caught one day but what the hell, it's a cheap bomber. ;-)

My first bomb (we carried Shrapnel bombs) did 3200 damage to Bensen Estler [BK-B.] He was one of the Dominix pilots. We regrouped and returned to a different vantage point. Our FC again picked the target and we started our run. This time I scored a 822 point hit on Hawksmor [-BXN-] in a Vexor Navy Issue. However, it was obvious that their logistics pilots were on the ball as the damage we did immediately repped. With bombs having such a relatively long flight time, they no doubt started actively repping ships in the danger zone before the bombs even detonated.

We regrouped once again. We'd lost a bomber or two by that point, I again didn't bother to count. I was already headed back to a new position for a third run. We did a rinse, lather, repeat. This time we targetted the logistics to see what happened. I managed to catch two of their ships in my radius. I did 273 damage to Urybcn [-BXN-] in an Oneiros and also managed to catch ady071 [R.U.B] in another Oneiros (primary) for over 600.

In the end we just didn't have enough bombers to do much more than harass them. They took the small tower out in short order and the Domis went home. The cruisers hung around for a bit, but we had other things to attend to. GFs were issued in local and we all went about our other business. I'd survived three bomb runs on a prepared fleet. I'm not cocky about it. It was mostly luck of the draw, and having a name in the upper half of the alphabet (ship too!) doesn't hurt. But I am satisfied with my first null-sec fight and I'm fairly certain this will happen again. I brought plenty of bombers... but that's not the only trick up our sleeves.